Homebound People

In the next few days, a large number of people belonging to different states of the region, who have been working or studying in other parts of the country will start returning home. While respective state governments have organised buses for bringing them back, the Indian Railways is yet to announce a schedule for bringing people from other states back to the Northeast. A large number of people have started registering through the helpline numbers created by the respective state governments, and students studying on Kota in Rajasthan have already arrived by special buses. While the entry to the Northeast happens to be only through the single 22-km wide Siliguri corridor, there are however as many as nine small village roads between West Bengal and Assam in addition to the two National Highways at Srirampur and Boxirhat, as also the lone railway track. That exactly is why the Assam government has already announced its plan for transit of people to their respective home-districts once they reach the inter-state border at Srirampur and Boxirhat. For Assam, there will also be additional responsibility of facilitating the transit of several thousand people who will be heading to their respective home states, these being Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura. Though there are no official data about exactly how many people from the Northeastern Region are working and studying outside the region, the situation created by the COVID-19 outbreak is one opportunity which every state government should avail to prepare a data-base. This data-base can be worked down to the district and panchayat level, which will come in handy for various other activities in the future. Unofficial estimates say that the number would be anywhere between 16 and 18 lakh. A Kerala government study conducted about five years ago had said that about 18 per cent of outside workers in Kerala were from Assam. Meanwhile, permitting people to return home within the Northeast has created quite a rush, especially at Bandardewa on the Arunachal-Assam border, as also at Kolasib on the Assam-Mizoram border. While the overall situation across the Northeast has remained impressively better than those in the rest of India, it is very important that the authorities test every individual returning to the region from outside, so that not a single positive person can slip into the community.